Those A Part Of The Movement

 As we were standing on the street outside my car, he said to me, write or call anytime you want.  "I'll call or write you back."

I got a text message saying that he was sorry and that he's been really busy and that I should call him some night this week.

I'm mad.  I know that I am hurt somewhere, too, because I wish that I meant more to him.

I've always treated him with respect and I wish that he treated me the same.  I wish that I mattered more to him.  I am letting go of the idea that we won't fit into each other's lives, but I still wish...

I wish you weren't so self-absorbed.  I wish that whatever stunted your development would let go of you, or that you would let go of it so you could be the wonderful full person that would match your spirit.  

I want to respond to you with irritation.

I want to be in love with someone who understands this darkness but who is not so shitty.



help...?

I went from talking about him to talking to him.

"..tired of fighting for a lost cause"

I am enjoying what I fear will be my last truly nice lunch hour in the park. The temp was 75 when I came out, but it is falling now. While I am sure there will be many more nice enough days. This might be the last one for me to be out with short sleeves and no jacket.

I am a summer person if you did not know.

Gaming Group this Wednesday my place from 7 to 11 (or later)

Bring your own games or play some of mine.

I have: Risk 2210 and Godstorm, Twilight Imperium, Shogun, conquest of the Empire, Apples to Apples, Spite and Malice and Cosmic Encounters

Here's a quote from a conservative writer that perfectly illustrates the main problem that I have with most conservatives these days:

"What sets conservatives, and by extension the GOP, apart is that we have always encouraged vigorous debate and the civil discourse necessary for the continuation of this American experiment. It is the foundation of our republic and the catalyst to our best ideas. But we succeed in our intellectual pursuits only because they stand firmly on the solid rock of our morality, our spirituality and our admission of and submission to the God that grants our souls the right to breathe. The sinking sand of liberal dogma will never be a suitable substitute." Doug Patton (source here)

In other words, the freedom of debate and discourse which is the foundation of the "American experiment" can exist only if it is grounded in faith in "God as conservatives understand Him"; there can be no such freedom to question those basic premises.

After twenty years or so of being enrolled in the Republican party (after I left what was then called the "Free Libertarian Party" in New York State, now called just the Libertarian Party), I have finally come home to the Democratic Party of my youth, and while I still don't agree with all the policies of ANY party, I think I'm probably here to stay.

This sermon was written to celebrate "International Children's Sabbath", which we celebrated October 12, instead of the suggested date of October 19. The facts and figures included in the sermon are from the Children's Defense Fund. The prayers are from Marian Wright Edleman's book, "I am your child, God." Unfortunately, the printed version here won't do the sermon justice. The prayers were read by the puppet team, and at the end, the puppets "sang" Listen to your children praying and then the congregation joined in. It sounds kind of hokey, but it was a really special sermon and the service was really moving as a whole.

( I am your child, God )

Scorpio Monday

Once upon a time, people sat in the cinema right through to the last frame of the movie. These days, if you hang around to watch the credits, you will be a lone figure in a sea of scattered popcorn. Respectful periods of transition are a thing of the past. Yet you now feel inclined to dwell longer on a scenario that is rapidly becoming a part of the past. There may be more that you need to learn before you move on, but you do need to be aware that you are moving on this week. That need not worry you.

cainer.com

Back from esozone...Also had dinner with Bill W and a new friend, Michael Skrtic. I'm fairly fried right now, but it was an interesting weekend. Listening to an excellent industrial band, Hekate. A fuller post about esozone available at magical experiments.

These are the Twitter updates I made today. For more see: My Twitter

• 13:49 Its 1:49 and I'm still in bed. Yeah that was a hell of a party. #

This is ridiculously hot...

Contact: AWBC Organizing Collective                                                          For Immediate Release

 
 
The 2008 A World Beyond Capitalism Conference: 4 Years Strong, 3 Documentaries Recorded, 2 Ways To Join us, 1 Mission: Networking and Working Together to Create A World of Peace, A World of Equality: A World That is Beyond Capitalism!

Dear friends,

Please forward this announcement widely.
 
The Fourth Annual A World Beyond Capitalism Conference 2008 invites activists to come to Olympia, Washington on October 25th and 26th, 2008 and engage in educational discussion and visionary dialogue.
We believe in the need to reflect and imagine the future of the world beyond capitalism. We will emphasize the need for multi-lingual, long-term strategy through open dialogue and bridging political theory with non-violent practice.

To see the homepage of the A World Beyond Capitalism Conference please click the below link: http://www.aworldbeyondcapitalism.org

Everything is free!  As it should be!  We ask that those who are able to do so, please bring food to contribute to our free-of-charge potluck meals.  We have been able to provide free-of-charge meals each year at the AWBC only due to the kindness of those who contribute.

Location of all workshops: The Freeschool Community, 610 Columbia Street, Olympia, WA 98501.  Even if you can't make it to this peace conference, we hope you can join the our Community (that will have videos of some of the workshops later) that we call the Peace Communities Social Networking Website and Online Community with Member Profiles, Discussion Forum, Event Listings, Photos & Slideshows, Custom Video Players, Real-time Activity Stream and much more: http://www.peacecommunities.ning.com

The website for the conference is http://www.aworldbeyondcapitalism.org

                                                                                           ###

The 2008 A World Beyond Capitalism Conference: 4 Years Strong, 3 Documentaries Recorded, 2 Ways To Join us, 1 Mission: Networking and Working Together to Create A World of Peace, A World of Equality: A World That is Beyond Capitalism!
 

Happy birthday to Marie, currently known as fuzzyparadox!

New approach to Logan: speak softly (since I don't impress him or anyone else when I try to yell at him) and carry a BIG water-sprayer.

I just found out they're making a movie of "Marley and Me." Too bad I can't take Logan to see it.

Oh, and to paraphrase something a Republican friend said about that other candidate for Vice-President, is it OK if I'm developing a little crush on Joe Biden? :-)

i'm being forcibly cross trained into catalog this week. i so need a new job. you'd think a fucking BS would qualify me for something other than call center hell. i so do not want to work catalog during holiday peak. I fucking hate shopping, do you really think i want to listen to people phone shop all fucking day? the pharmacy contract is up in june so the job i have now will cease to exist come june, i had thought i'd just be able to work til june and look for something new between now and then, but no due to corporate temper tantrums if we don't cross train we'll be fired next month. fuckers. because we're supposed to realize the importance of catalog to the company and want to help with peak and see this as an opportunity to get in on the "ground floor" now. hello, when there's only one floor everyone gets in on the ground floor and fucking stays there. jag offs. as if they pay me enough to give a shit what's good for the company. i personally don't care if the entire place disappears off the place of the planet tomorrow, just call me and let me know not to show up, i don't want to waste time showering and driving there. at least i have a straight 9-5 schedule all this week.

Quoting the bible doesn't impress me, but this is beautiful and one of the few passages that has ever touched me.


The video is an ad calling for the defeat of Proposition 8 in California with a reading from 1 Corinthians Chapter 13 (yes I had a bible handy to look it up :-p). Why should a married heterosexual care about legal same-sex marriages? I feel that we as a society needs to be promoting love in whatever form it finds, not limiting it based on a book written 2,000 years ago.

Football players fined for doing the Cupid Shuffle in the endzone. You guys know I'm really a basketball fan, I don't even really care it was the Dolphins who were fined. What I don't understand is the concept of fining a player for celebrating something. You can't spike the ball, you can't dance in the end zone, where's the fun in any of that? I mean I get it that it's not sportsmanlike to ya know - make gestures in the losing team's faces, or hog the ball for a full minute or something, but it's not like that! You can high five LeBron after he drains a three. You can take your golden tennis shoes off and kiss them at the Olympics. Why can't a player dance for 10 seconds, for Pete's sake? Somebody 'splain this to me.

Oh and yes I am aware that I posted "the Happy Dance", I just actually 'prefer' that song. ;)

Cupid Shuffle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h24_zoqu4_Q

Miami Dolphins: http://www.emqb.com/three-dolphins-fined-for-cupid-shuffle/

The creepiest — or most exciting — thing you will see on YouTube today is this new video of the Repliee R-1, an android that just went for its first spin at the 2008 CEATEC Exhibition in Japan. Based on an actual five-year-old girl, this robot can speak, wave, walk, pick things up, and even sense when other objects touch its skin. And I'm having trouble not referring to it as "she," which should tell you how eerie the resemblance is between the Repliee R-1 and a physical human girl.

The Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University, led by Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, has been working on lifelike robots, called "actroids," for several years; their first prototype went public in November 2003. The childlike Repliee R-1 has 50 sensors inside its body, and its silicon skin was formed from a mold of a human girl. I wonder what that girl thinks of her actroid twin:

There was a This American Life episode on this sometime back that dealt with explaining the global subprime mortgage financial crisis (now known as a worldwide credit crisis). About 26 minutes into the first episode [thislife.org], you hear them talk about exactly this (you can stream the shows from these links or look at transcripts). Alex Blumberg & Adam Davidson are two producers of the show interviewing those involved. Enjoy this dialog from the show on the no doc loans these idiots were handing out like candy to anyone:

Alex Blumberg: But Glen didn't worry about whether the loans were good. That's someone else's problem. And this way of thinking thrived at every step of this mortgage security chain. A guy like Mike Francis, from Morgan Stanley, he told me he bought loans, lots of loans, from Glen's company, and he knew in his gut they were bad loans. Like these NINA loans.
Mike Francis: No income no asset loans. That's a liar's loan. We are telling you to lie to us. We're hoping you don't lie. Tell us what you make, tell us what you have in the bank, but we won't verify? We're setting you up to lie. Something about that feels very wrong. It felt wrong way back when and I wish we had never done it. Unfortunately, what happened ... we did it because everyone else was doing it.
Alex Blumberg: It's easy to ignore your gut fear when you are making a fortune in commissions. But Mike had other help in rationalizing what he was doing. Technological help. Mike sat at a desk with six computer screens, connected to millions of dollars worth of fancy analytic software designed by brilliant Ivy league math geniuses hired by his firm, which analyzed all the loans in all the pools that he bought and then sold. And the software, the data ... didn't seem worried at all:
Mike Francis: All the data that we had to review, to look at, on loans in production that were years old, was positive. They performed very well. All those factors, when you look at the pieces and parts. A 90% NINA loan from 3 years ago is performing amazingly well. Has a little bit of risk. Instead of defaulting 1.5% of the time it defaults at 3.5% of the time. That's not so bad. If I'm an investor buying that, if I get a little bit of return, I'm fine.
Adam Davidson: Wait Alex. I want to step in for a moment because this is a very important piece of tape. A big part of this story, of this whole crisis, is that a lot of really smart people, people who knew better, fooled themselves with this data. It was the triumph of data over common sense. Can you play that tape again?
Mike Francis: All the data that we had to review to look at, on loans in production, that were years old, was positive.
Adam Davidson: As we now know, they were using the wrong data. They looked at the recent history of mortgages and saw that foreclosure rate is generally below 2 percent. So they figured, absolute worst-case scenario, the foreclosure rate may go to 8 or 10 or 12 percent. But the problem with is the

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